CERULEAN W, singing, S side of Cherry Hill (stand on boulder and face downtown), 10:45 AM #cpkbirds
Based on discussions with several birders, we are sending unusual-to-rare bird alerts via
Twitter using the hash tag
#cpkbirds. The intent is to provide timely alerts of interesting species in
the park, NOT to provide a venue for day lists or reports of more common birds.
Use eBirdsNYC if you want to do that.
The sort of species that we are interested in include:
| Northern Goshawk | but not Red-tailed, Red-shouldered, Broad-winged Hawks, other Accipiters |
| Osprey | |
| Bald Eagle | but not flyovers |
| Glaucous Gull | also Iceland Gull, Lesser Black-backed Gull |
| Black-billed Cuckoo | |
| Yellow-billed Cuckoo | |
| Chuck-will's-widow | |
| Whip-poor-will | |
| Olive-sided Flycatcher | but not Eastern Wood-Pewee, Eastern Phoebe |
| Yellow-bellied Flycatcher | but not Least Flycatcher |
| Acadian Flycatcher | |
| Alder Flycatcher | |
| Willow Flycatcher | |
| Philadelphia Vireo | |
| Marsh Wren | |
| Bicknell's Thrush | but not other Catharus thrushes or Wood Thrush |
| Golden-winged Warbler | |
| Tennessee Warbler | but not Nashville |
| Orange-crowned Warbler | |
| Cape May Warbler | |
| Yellow-throated Warbler | |
| Bay-breasted Warbler | |
| Cerulean Warbler | |
| Prothonotary Warbler | |
| Worm-eating Warbler | |
| Kentucky Warbler | |
| Connecticut Warbler | |
| Mourning Warbler | |
| Yellow-breasted Chat | |
| Summer Tanager | but not Scarlet |
| Vesper Sparrow | |
| Grasshopper Sparrow | and any other Ammodramus sparrows (Henslows, Saltmarsh/Nelson's etc) |
| Blue Grosbeak | |
| Evening Grosbeak | |
| Dickcissel | |
| Eastern Meadowlark | |
| Rusty Blackbird | |
| Bobolink |
and of course any other obviously rare birds that we haven't anticipated. Note that these are rare to very uncommon and no common birds are included. So Blue Grosbeak is on this list but Rose-breasted is not. Summer Tanager is on the list, but not Scarlet Tanager. A rule of thumb: if you see more than five in the park per season, it's too common. Blackburnian Warbler and Hooded Warblers are examples of that.
Your post should get people on the bird, but Twitter limits tweets to 140 characters. Example:
CERULEAN W, singing, S side of Cherry Hill (stand on boulder and face downtown), 10:45 AM #cpkbirds
Phil, May 2011, @cpkbirder on Twitter.
If you are using the Twitter App use the magnifying glass icon at the bottom of the screen to conduct a Twitter search for "#cpkbirds". You can save this search and recall it. To monitor posts you have to re-do this search each time. You'll want some sort of Twitter app or you will not be able to make your own tweets when you see a rare bird. (Note: we didn't make up this terminology).
You can use the app Boxcar to attempt to get live/timely "push" notifications from the Twitter feed. In our hands this works sometimes kinda sorta.
Boxcar supports "services" that you can add to your Boxcar account.
One of these can be a Twitter search to monitor hashtags. Just monitor #cpkbirds. This doesn't turn out to be very reliable at all. The alternative
is to monitor an "RSS feed". The Twitter RSS feed for the #cpkbirds search is
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23cpkbirds
You can also use this RSS feed in regular RSS
readers like Google reader, but RSS readers don't offer "push" notifications.
If you prefer just to use a web page, go to the Twitter search page and make the search. How old school of you.
You can also turn on "push" notifications of messages using Twitter Mobile. See instructions here. Now this doesn't suddenly monitor #cpkbirds for you. However you can selectively decide to be alerted whenever someone you wish to monitor makes a tweet, as long as you are following them (on Twitter, not actual stalking). Click on their name in your Timeline and you'll see their profile in the side bar. Next to the large green "Following" button is a small mobile phone icon. Click that to enable following their tweets via text message. The icon will turn green if you are receiving their tweets via Text Message. I SUGGEST THAT YOU DON'T DO THIS FOR EVERYONE. Not everyone uses their Twitter account only for #cpkbirds updates. Or perhaps you like a deluge of text messages.
Please note that we are learning as we go here and we have not found the all-encompassing perfect solution. You are encouraged to experiment with it for yourself but please do not flood #cpkbirds with test messages - the rest of us are monitoring it for actual bird sightings.